


Sorry!

by Renee_Lytle



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, M/M, Mild Blood, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 08:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16214957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Renee_Lytle/pseuds/Renee_Lytle
Summary: Dean makes a charm bracelet for his newly-human boyfriend Castiel. It's completely handmade with love and was finished with a powerful spell from Rowena. Is it enough to protect Cas from harm?





	Sorry!

**Author's Note:**

> I sweat to God this idea started as fluff, but it... turned into something else.

Cas had been human for weeks now and Dean wasn’t sleeping well. Even with Cas stretched out next to him, breathing deeply and rhythmically, didn’t help. The dude didn’t even snore for cryin out loud, but Dean would still lie awake for hours without any shut eye. 

 

The freakin insomnia was getting on his nerves. It was getting on everyone’s nerves, which only made Dean even  _ more _ irritated. Rowena had decided to move in as well which didn’t help, and Cas’ optimism was starting to rub him the wrong way. Which is saying something because normally Cas knew all the right ways to rub him.

 

He didn’t understand how Cas could be so relaxed now that he wasn’t practically invincible. It’s like the man had a death wish or something.

 

Dean took a sip of his beer and set it back on the kitchen counter. Cas had bought the beer by accident once but it’d been so good they continued to get it at the store. Or maybe it wasn’t so much that it was good on it’s own, but that the memory attached to the first tasting was the delicious part. Him and Cas might’ve drank some right before making out for the first time in the rooftop garden, with Cas’ bees buzzing lazily around, and the taste of citrus mingling on their tongues. Whatever, the beer was fine.

 

After a few more pulls from the bottle Dean took a deep breath in to calm his sleep-deprived thoughts. Rowena had just given him back the bracelet that she’d placed the spell over. Cas would be out of the shower soon and then he’d put it on him and maybe, just maybe, Dean would be able to sleep. Rowena might be freakin annoying at times but he had to admit she knew her stuff. This way he would always know when Cas was in trouble.

 

He heard a rattle behind him and turned to see Cas in the kitchen doorway wearing nothing but loose-fitting jeans that threatened to slid off his narrow hips. He’d lost a little weight since becoming human because he wasn’t used to eating and now Dean’s jeans were a little too big instead of a little too small.

 

“We need to take you shopping,” Dean said. 

 

Cas looked down at his ensemble and frowned but when he looked back to Dean he smiled because Dean was smiling too, he couldn’t help it.

 

“Want to play?” Cas asked and shook the gamebox again.

 

Dean groaned and turned back to his beer. “We  _ just _ played last night.”

 

Cas stepped up behind him and set the game on the counter. Then he ran a hand through Dean’s hair and a tingling sensation went over his scalp, down his back, and straight to his crotch. Before Cas’ hands could wander any farther though Dean turned and took a half step back. 

 

“Cas listen,” he said in a rush before he could chicken out. Even after all these months of being together Dean was still bad when it came to emotions and crap. “I made this for you to wear, as protection, kind of. Well no, not exactly–see, it’s got a spell on it but not a protection spell, I mean, it  _ is _ for your protection but it’s not like a shield or something, you know?”

 

Dean was babbling, he knew he was babbling, so he stopped talking and just grabbed Cas left wrist and tied the leather charm bracelet around it.

 

Cas was still looking at him in utter confusion but when he glanced down at the bracelet he got very still. He remained silent as he ran a finger over the six charms attached to the leather.

 

Finally he asked, “you  _ made _ this?”

Dean only nodded.

 

“And it has a protection spell on it?”

 

He was going to start babbling again wasn’t he? 

 

“Well not exact-” Cas cut him off with a kiss and Dean’s shoulders relaxed. He grabbed the front of Cas’ jeans and pulled him closer. Now that all the  _ feelings _ were out of the way they could get on to things that Dean was better at.

 

Then Cas pulled away just long enough to say, “I love you too.”

 

–––––––––

 

It was supposed to work.  _ Why hadn’t it worked _ ?

 

Except that it had worked. There was nothing wrong with the spell bracelet, it was Dean who’d failed. He’d failed him, again, and that was the real kicker wasn’t it?

 

Dean drained his beer and reached for the six pack sitting next to him. They weren’t cold anymore, and the condensation was pooling at the bottom of the cardboard, making a small puddle on the library table. 

 

They were awful beers, some dark stout something or rather that Sam liked. If Cas had been the last person to go to the store there would be light beer in the fridge. Last summer Cas had bought the wrong kind of beer, something with grapefruit, and they’d shared them together in the bunker’s rooftop garden while Cas’ bees had buzzed around them. That had been the first time he’d felt at peace after Michael was forced out.

 

Dean’s fist clenched around the bracelet and he took a ragged breath in as slowly as he could to stop the rising panic. The leather cuff was supposed to help Dean protect Cas, and it had only gotten him killed.  _ Dean _ had only gotten him killed.

 

And he was nowhere.

 

Jack tried to call him back from the empty but heard only silence. Chuck was gone again, past hearing their prayers and they didn’t know how long he’d be gone this time. Maybe he’d never come back. Heaven was hanging on by a thread so it’d been easy to search for him there, but so far they hadn’t found anything. Even Billie admitted she had no idea where he could be, and she’d been genuinely upset that there was something out there that she herself didn’t understand.

 

What happened to a fallen-angel-turned-human’s soul anyway? Where had the universe thrown him?

 

_ Maybe he just doesn’t exist anymore. _

 

The intrusive thought hit Dean too fast and he folded both hands around the bracelet and leaned his head down against them. Maybe to an outsider he looked like he was praying to God, but he was praying to Cas. As hard as he could he prayed to him.

 

“Please Cas,” he said out loud. “Where are you man?”

 

He felt a sharp pain in the pad of his thumb and unfolded his hands. The bracelet was untied and lay flat across both palms. The piece of metal taken from baby, folded to look like a tiny dagger, had broken the skin and a speck of blood stained the tip of it. 

 

Dean took the bracelet in his fingers and stretched it out against the light of the room so he could see it clearly. It had taken him months to make, each charm had to have meaning, had to be closely attached to both of them. That’s what Rowena had said, the  _ only _ thing she’d said. Why were witches always so fucking vague?

 

His fingers moved to clench against his fists again but he grabbed the beer bottle instead and drained it. He’d collected the charms anyway without her help.

 

The bracelet was a leather cuff made from one of Dean’s favorite jackets that had gotten torn up in some fight. He’d never gotten rid of it because it was the jacket he’d been wearing when Cas had said “Dean? I… I think I might love you.” 

 

Instead of reaching for another beer Dean ran his fingers over the first charm, the name patch from the first time Cas had been human. It was fixed to the leather with brass tabs and was just flexible enough to bend a little when Cas tied the cuff around his wrist. Dean had been surprised when he actually found the blue vest at the bottom of a drawer in Cas’ bedroom. He remembered wondering why Cas had kept it, and he’d meant to ask, but never got around to it.

 

The second charm was a piece of wood taken from Cas’ bee box and had  _ Castiel _ in enochian carved onto it. Dean had sanded the piece of wood until it was as smooth as he could make it, drilled a hole in the top, and had attached it to the bracelet with a spell-enforced strip of leather. Rowena had enforced all the smaller strips of leather so the charms wouldn’t break off during fights. 

 

The hardest part about the little wood charm had been finding the right symbol for Cas’ name. Dean, not wanting to alert him to what he’d been doing, couldn’t just ask him. You’d think the former angel would’ve have  _ something  _ with his freakin name on it but after searching through his things for hours Dean had moved on. He couldn’t fit Castiel’s name spelled out letter by letter on the charm, he needed the shorthand symbol, the one given to him when God created him.

 

Finally, deep in the bunker’s archives he’d found records with parts of the bible written in enochian. Thankfully the part with The Angel of Thursday had been there and, with translation help from Sam, he’d found it. 

 

It was a beautifully intricate symbol and had taken Dean hours of careful carving to get it just right on the charm. He’d even done the carving on a thursday, just in case that kind of thing mattered in spells. 

 

The third charm was the miniscule dagger made with metal taken from the car. It had been weeks since Dean had started making the charms and he’d been frustrated because he couldn’t think of anything else. To try and cheer him up, because he’d been grumpy toward everyone in the bunker and no one knew why, Cas had taken him to get a burger. They never made it to the burger place.

 

Dean had pulled into a small grove of trees next to a field and they’d made love for the first time in the back seat. Afterward, when they’d gotten back to the bunker sans burgers and grinning like the couple of dumbasses they were, Dean had cut off a small piece of the silver door trim from the bottom of the passenger side.

 

The fourth charm was another one that was attached flush to the cuff instead of dangling like the rune and the dagger. It was a strip of the magnetic tape cut from the end of “Dean’s Top 13 Zepp Traxx.” He hadn’t wanted to ruin the tape but the very end hadn’t been recorded on and Sam assured him that he knew how to put it back together when they were done. At this point Sammy had known what Dean was doing and ribbed him about it every freakin chance he got.

 

Dean realized he was smiling at the memory only when it started to slip from his face, like the corners of his mouth couldn’t hold all the weight from all the shit and had to fall back down. 

 

The fifth charm was Dean’s favorite because it was one of Cas’ feathers. Before he’d lost his wings Cas had given them a bunch of his feathers in case they’d need them for spells, and when they’d moved into the bunker Sam had put them in inventory. They were freakin huge too. So big that Sammy had to put them into a six-foot-long crate. He’d thought of cutting the end off one but just the idea of taking a knife to them made Dean sick. In true Rowena “I’m hundreds of years old and I know things” fashion, she’d knocked on Dean’s bedroom door one night with one of Cas’ feathers, no bigger than her pinky. She’d offered no explanation, and Dean never asked.

 

He caught the feather lightly between two fingers and marveled at how soft it was.

 

He grabbed for another beer and leaned back in his chair, fixing his eyes on the ceiling as he drained the bottle. It was warm but Dean didn’t think the beer was good cold anyway and he couldn’t move to hard A or he’d black out. Perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. It was his fault that Cas was dead after all.

 

His fault, his fault, his fault. The bracelet had worked, it was a good spell, the bracelet had worked. It was  _ his _ fault.

 

The memory forced its way to the surface and there was nothing Dean could do to stop it.

 

–––––––––

 

The first time Dean felt the power of the spell was unnerving to say the least. It was like tiny needles jamming themselves repeatedly into the back of his neck. He was ultimately grateful that the sensation was so unsettling because it meant he would always know when Cas needed help. 

 

Since Dean was rarely without Cas the sensation didn’t come up very often. The spell was only triggered when they were a significant distance apart. His logic had been that he only needed to be alerted when he couldn’t physically watch Cas’ back because otherwise, if the spell was triggered every single time Cas was in danger, he’d have to live with the constant feeling of needles in his neck.

 

It was the third time he’d ever felt those warning pricks down the top of his spine and he still wasn’t used to the sensation but he booked it as fast as he could to the other side of the warehouse they’d been searching. There was supposed to be a vampire nest here but Dean hadn’t seen any signs, until now.

 

As he neared the end of the building he heard scuffling and growling. Something was attacking Cas and Dean’s heart felt like it was going to burst out of his chest. Cas was a good fighter but he still sometimes forgot that he wasn’t immune to practically everything but a blow from an angel blade. In the first week he was human he’d nearly gotten himself killed when he walked right up to a demon with a knife. Thankfully the demon missed vital organs when he stabbed Cas but they’d had a hell of a time getting the blood to stop flowing from him.

 

When he rounded the corner into a large open space he caught sight of Cas backed into a corner by a vampire. Cas’ machete was lying on the floor behind them and he was trying to avoid the vampire’s hands. If the vampire got a hold of him he wouldn’t stand a chance against its strength.

 

Dean started toward them and something metallic rang out sharply, echoing around the huge room. He must’ve kicked something.

 

It was the sound that made Cas take his eyes off the vampire and Dean was still too far away. In the moments right before the vampire tore through Cas’ heart Dean felt those warning needles plunging into the back of his neck so deep it felt like they were puncturing bone. The spell shouldn’t have been going off still, he could see Cas, but the pain just grew more intense the closer he got.

 

Dean met Cas’ wide, terrified eyes as he fell to the dirty warehouse floor. He was close enough that he could see the brilliant blue of them in the failing light. The color made his mind go white-hot and his ears filled with static. Then all that existed was the jarring feeling of impact along his arm as he took the vampire's head off from behind at a run.

 

And he didn’t slow down until he was on the floor with Cas’ dead weight curled onto his lap. The blood from the vampire seeped around them, mixing with the river flowing from Cas’ chest, until Dean was left shivering in an ocean of red.

 

–––––––––

 

The light had gone from Cas’ eyes before he’d even reached the floor. He’d died in a matter of seconds and Dean knew this because he’d watched the entirety of his lover’s life drain in the few steps it had taken him to close the distance.

 

He’d died afraid, Dean had seen that too. Never in his life had he seen so much white surrounding those baby blues, too-wide with shock and pain.

 

Dean saw those eyes every time he closed his own. He took sleeping pills nightly so he wouldn’t have to see those eyes for very long before falling into a chemically-forced slumber.

 

Tears burned tracks down Dean’s face. His whole body was clenched around the memory and it was getting hard for him to drag air into his lungs. This wasn’t how their non-happy ending was supposed to go. Dean never once entertained the idea that they could ever have a happy ending, but he’d hoped they might have one that didn’t border on the tragic.

 

_ Guess that was out the window now _ .

 

The laugh burst from him in a ragged bark and it continued in wet bursts through his tears until he really couldn’t pull in a breath.

 

“God dammit, god dammit GOD DAMMIT,” he screamed into the empty library to stop the manic laughter that was still coming from him. He gulped in breaths between sobs. The laughter had stopped but his whole body was locked in grief so tight his head was starting to fill with hot air. He was going to pass out.

 

Then he heard a muffled snap and felt something give in his hand. Some of the bracelet was wrapped up in his fingers but the part with the sixth and final charm was trapped between his palm and the pad of his thumb.

 

Dean’s heart dropped as he slowly uncurled his fingers. The last charm was broken. It was a blue Sorry! gamepiece and it was snapped off at the neck.

 

The memory of Cas in a hospital gown and trenchcoat. The anger Dean had felt because he was helpless against Cas’ mental pain. The regret that had washed over him when he’d thrown the gamboard to the ground. The healing that was started when Dean apologized years later and gave Cas Sorry! as a gift. The look of joy on Cas’ face every time he got to practice his sarcasm saying  _ sorry _ whenever he knocked Dean’s pieces back.

 

Through the tears still falling from his eyes Dean looked at the broken charm cradled in his palm. He’d drilled a hole in the wide bottom of the plastic toy in order to attach it to the cuff, leaving the tapered end dangling downward. How had it not broken before now?  _ Why was he always breaking things he cared for the most _ ?

 

“I’m sorry Cas,” he whispered. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”


End file.
